Monthly Archives: August 2017

VMware announced VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 Data Center edition at VMworld in Las Vegas. We are truly excited about our latest OpenStack distribution that gives our customers the new features and enhancements included in the Ocata release, with a bundled Container platform option included. For OpenStack cloud admins, the 4.0 Data Center edition is also about enhanced platform performance and manageability, increased scale and advanced networking.

New Features Include:

OpenStack Features available in Newton + Ocata:

VIO 4.0 is based on the upstream Ocata release. Ocata is the first release in which Cells v2 is the default deployment configuration for OpenStack Nova, a single Cell is supported in Ocata. Cell support enables future scale out of an OpenStack cloud in a more distributed fashion. The placement service, introduced in the Newton release, is now an essential part of VIO 4.0 in determining the optimum placement of VMs. Not to be mistaken with VMware DRS, the OpenStack placement service allows a cloud admin set up pools of resources, and then set up allocations for resource providers. VM placement policies can be built on top of those resources for optimal placement of VMs (Additional blogs to follow).

New capabilities in OpenStack Horizon include: enhanced workload placements, LBaaSv2 and Heat template versions to name a few. Heat template versions provide user with a list of available template versions and functions for a particular template version.

Resource tagging, Cinder availability zones, enhanced Cinder snapshots, and Heat templates with conditions are some of the other notable enhancements available from upstream release in VIO 4.0 release.

vRealize Automation Integration

Another great example of VMware empowers customers to leverage existing investment in infrastructure management and tooling. Integration provides enterprise customers the ability to consume VIO resources with governance. Using vRA XaaS blueprints, a cloud admin can automate OpenStack user and project creation, governance based Heat template deployment or other common aspects of VIO consumption through vRA governance. Once OpenStack resources are on-boarded, vRA integration allows cloud admins and users to view the VIO Horizon dashboard directly from the vRA portal using SSO integration with vIDM.

Enhanced Neutron availability zone support allows OpenStack tenants to place NSX ESG workloads to different physical clusters, across different racks for increased availability. Finally, Firewall-as-a-Service and guest VLAN tagging are some of the other major Neutron enhancements.

Enhanced Platform Support

We are extremely proud of multi-vCenter support in VIO 4.0. Multi-VC support with NSX-T allows VIO customers the ability to define multiple fault/availability zones, avoiding single point of failure. Multi-VC can also be used for scaling out VIO by adding more vCenters upon reaching concurrency or total object limits.

Enterprise workloads require both horizontal and vertical scaling. While horizontal scaling is made simple through Heat or Terraform, vertical scaling often requires downtime/outage window. With VIO 4.0, cloud admins can offer Glance images that support live resize: OpenStack tenants can increase CPU, Memory, and disk of their virtual machine without VM powering down. VIO 4.0 also provides increased resiliency with vCenter HA and LVM support on the OMS server to allow flexible storage growth.

Enterprise Grade Container

Finally, VIO offers enterprise grade Kubernetes with built in security, HA and scale (up or down). Out of box, VIO provides Cloud Admins with simplified day 1 deployment automation for Kubernetes with multi-tenancy and user management. Once deployed, VIO Kubernetes integrates easily with SDDC vRealize suite of products solving day 2 operational challenges in container life cycle Management, monitoring and logging. Persistent storage, load balancing and container networking powered by VMware NSX are also standard out of box.

Adopting agile processes is a key driver to help business digitally transform. It is changing not only the way applications are coded, but also the process they are built and operated. In the new DevOps driven era, infrastructure admins and developers are solving the same problem – faster time to value. VIO 4.0 is the answer for any organization looking to digitally transform their business.

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) is an OpenStack distribution supported by VMware, optimized to run on top of VMware’s SDDC infrastructure. In the past few months we have been hard at work, adding additional enterprise grade capabilities into VIO, making it even more robust, scalable and secure, yet keeping it easy to deploy, operate and use.

VMware Integrated OpenStack 4.0 is based on Ocata, and some of the highlights include:

– Containers support – users can run VMs alongside containers on VIO. Out-of-the-box container support enables developers to consume Kubernetes APIs, leveraging all the enterprise grade capabilities of VIO such as multi-tenancy, persistent volumes, high availability (HA), and so on.

– Integration with vRealize Automation – vRealize Automation customers can now embed OpenStack components in blueprints. They can also manage their OpenStack deployments through the Horizon UI as a tab in vRealize Automation. This integration provides additional governance as well as single-sign-on for users.

– Multi vCenter support – customers can manage multiple VMware vCenters with a single VIO deployment, for additional scale and isolation.

– Additional capabilities for better performance and scale, such as live resize of VMs (changing RAM, CPU and disk without shutting down the VM), Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), CPU pinning and more.

Our customers use VMware Integrated OpenStack for a variety of use cases, including:

Developer cloud – providing public cloud-like user experience to developers, as well as more choice of consumption (Web UI, CLI or API), self-service and programmable access to VMware infrastructure. With the new container management support, developers will be able to consume Kubernetes APIs.

Our customers tell us (consistently) that VIO is easy to deploy (“it just worked!”) and manage. Since it’s deployed on top of VMware virtualization technologies, they are able to deploy and manage it by themselves, without hiring new people or professional services. Their development and DevOps teams like VIO because it gives them the agility and user experience they want, with self-service and standard OpenStack APIs.

In most cases, in a short amount of time (few weeks!) customers trust VIO enough to run their business-critical applications, such as e-commerce website or online travel system, in production.

VMware Integrated OpenStack will be available as a standalone product later this quarter. For more information go to our website, check out the product walkthrough and try out the hands-on lab.

If you are attending VMworld, please stop by our booth (#1139) to see demos and speak with OpenStack specialists. We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Don’t Miss Out!

VMworld 2017 Las Vegas is just around the corner and we can’t wait to meet our customers and partners, and explore all the great sessions, workshops and activities planned for next week. With over 500 sessions across all categories, it may be overwhelming to understand which sessions are most beneficial for you. Here is the list of all the OpenStack related session, make sure you register and mark your calendar in advance so you don’t miss out!

In addition, make sure to stop by the VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) booth (#1139) to learn more and see a demo or two.

[MGT2609BU] VMware Integrated OpenStack: What’s New
It is not OpenStack or VMware; it is OpenStack on VMware.
Come and learn what is new in VMware Integrated OpenStack and our plans for the future of OpenStack on the software-defined data center.

Monday, Aug 28, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | Islander F, Lower Level

[LDT1844BU] Open Source at VMware: A Key Ingredient to Our Success and Yours
Open-source components are part of practically every software product or service today. VMware products are no exception. And increasingly, IT departments are presented with many application roll-out requests that include large open-source components as part of the infrastructure on which they rely. From OpenStack to Docker to Kubernetes and beyond, open source is a reality of the enterprise environment. VMware is investing in open source both as a user of many components (and contributor to many of those projects) and as a creator of many successful open-source projects such as Open vSwitch, Harbor, Clarity, and many more. This session will talk about the what, the why, and the how of our engagement in open source: our vision and strategy and why all this is critically important for our customers.

[MTE4803U] OpenStack in the Enterprise with Marcos Hernandez
Speak with Expert Marcos Hernandez about the benefits of running OpenStack in private Cloud environments.

Tuesday, Aug 29, 4:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Oceanside D, Level 2

[MGT1785PU] OpenStack in the Real World: VMware Integrated OpenStack Customer Session
More and more customers are looking to leverage OpenStack to add automation and provide open API to their application development teams. In this session, VMware Integrated OpenStack customers will share their OpenStack journey and the benefits VMware Integrated OpenStack provides to development teams and IT.

[VMTN6664U] Networking and Security Challenges in OpenStack
CloudsDecided it’s time to implement OpenStack to build your Cloud? Have you tested in the lab, evaluated the various distributions available, and hired a specialized team for OpenStack? However, when it arrives the time to put into production Neutron is not integrating with your physical network? If the above story closely resembles what you have been facing, this TechTalk is critical for you to understand the challenges of Networking and Security with any OpenStack distribution and what solutions are missing for your Cloud to fully works. NOTE: Community TechTalk taking place in VMvillage.

[NET1338BU] VMware Integrated OpenStack and NSX Integration Deep Dive
OpenStack offers a very comprehensive set of Network and Security workflows provided by a core project called Neutron. Neutron can leverage VMware NSX as a backend to bring advanced services to the applications owned by OpenStack. In this session we will cover the use cases for Neutron, and the various topologies available in OpenStack with NSX, with a focus on security. We will walk you through a number of design considerations leveraging Neutron Security Groups and the NSX Stateful Distributed Firewall integration, along with Service Chaining in NSX for Next Generation Security Integration, all available today.

Wednesday, Aug 30, 8:00 a.m. – 9:00 a.m. | Surf A, Level 2

[FUT3076BU] Simplifying Your Open-Source Cloud With VMware
Open source or VMware? Clearly, you can’t have both, right? Wrong. As open-source, cloud-based solutions continue to evolve, IT leaders are challenged with the adoption and implementation of large-scale deployments such as OpenStack and network function virtualization from both a business and technical perspective. Learn how VMware’s solutions can simplify existing open-source innovation, resulting in new levels of operations, standardization (app compatibility), and delivery of enterprise support.

Wednesday, Aug 30, 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. | Surf A, Level 2

[FUT1744BU] The Benefits of VMware Integrated OpenStack for Your NFV Platform
Communication Service Providers (CSPs) embracing network functions virtualization (NFV) are building platforms with three imperatives in mind: service agility, service uptime and platform openness. These capabilities require the cloud platform they choose to be able to easily model, deploy and modify a service, to run it on a tightly-integrated robust virtual infrastructure and migrate the service horizontally across cloud platforms when/if needed. Come to this session to learn about VIO, a VMware-supported OpenStack (OS) distribution, at the heart of the VMware NFV platform and how it can help CSPs meet those requirements. We will look in detail at the role of VIO as virtual infrastructure manager as well as its native integration with the other components of the VMware software-defined data center architecture (vSphere, NSX and VSAN).